8 ms·
I have seen a number of (like, many many) videos where annotations were used for corrections on the content, so now all of that content is going to be wrong :(.
by saurik 8y ago
I have seen a number of (like, many many) videos where annotations were used for corrections on the content, so now all of that content is going to be wrong :(.
I realize that these things are sometimes annoying, and that mobile users couldn't see them... but they existed, and were part of the content--in many cases I have seen, because the video publisher didn't know how to do editing and so used the annotation feature to do it instead--and now that content is going to be damaged, forever.
FWIW, this was effectively the only way to fix content after it had been posted without changing the URL... something you would expect to be a critical feature of any publishing platform, and one that Google themselves has used at times and offered to close partners because clearly they need that feature themselves, but which YouTube doesn't really provide and apparently has now decided to provide even less :(.
- solarkraft 8y ago> and that mobile users couldn't see them... Which is ENTIRELY on Google.
- samwillis 8y agoI think it’s more to do with Apple actually. I don’t believe google could place them on a full screen video on iOS.
- hvidgaard 8y agoAbsolutely nothing prevents Youtube from embedding the annotations in the video for playback on restricted devices.
- setquk 8y agoYou can't and never could do so why implement it?
- read_if_gay_ 8y agoThe youtube app has its own frontend for video playback.
- samwillis 8y agoTrue, but not within safari.
- snaky 8y agoWhy anybody would play YouTube videos in Safari on iOS? Don't tell me iOS don't open YouTube links in YouTube app automatically?
- not_kurt_godel 8y agoI use Brave to watch videos, never the Youtube app, which I don't have installed. It at least gives the illusion that I have control over the requests Youtube is making from my phone. God only knows how much sneaky data collection they do with the app...
- mikewhy 8y agoUsed to be if you used Safari you can play video in the background. On iPad it also meant you can get picture-in-picture. Not sure if those "tricks" still work.
- Wowfunhappy 8y agoCan confirm this doesn't work anymore, and hasn't for a while actually. (There is, however, a wonderful Jailbreak tweak that restores the functionality.)
- WeAreGoingIn 8y agoTry Opera Mini on IOS.
- Wowfunhappy 8y agoWhy should I install a separate app just for Youtube when the website works fine?
- 8y ago
- Klover 8y agoWhat is or isn’t allowed on iOS limits the Android app? Of course iOS users are a significant amount, but they could do something for only a mere like 90% of their mobile user base. It’s just that annotations weren’t working with their mouse focus, while cards have been there as a replacement since forever in internet age. (More towards saurik) Maybe it’s very noble to want to hoard annotations on 100 views cat videos from 2009, but I’m sure the amount of significant losses that won’t be solved by simply adding a comment to the video is next to nothing.
- ehsankia 8y agoCan you make them non-interactable and bake them in there? Maybe a second layer video shown on top?
- kennydude 8y agoHow does the endscreen functionality work then?
- tokyodude 8y agoYes it's at least partly about Apple and it's partly the fact that Apple doesn't allow browser competition (only skinned Safari). If Apple allowed browser competition then Firefox and Chrome would likely support fullscreen mode (like they both do on Android) and Apple would effectively be pushed to add it to mobile Safari or lose market share. On the other hand I wish Google would give me the option to bake in the annotations if they're going to remove them. I have a few instructional videos with corrections in the annotations. Those will be gone and the videos will end up being wrong.
- samat 8y agoUsing webkit engine to build a browser is not skinning Safari. There is much more to the browser than rendering engine.
- tokyodude 8y agoBut as far as what APIs you can expose to JS there is a limit. Can you expose WebGL2? Fullscreen? Screen Orientatio API? WebVR? WebAssembly? Input type=Color, OffscreenCanvas? or do you have to wait for Apple to add them to the base iOS WebKit? Can you fix the fact that iOS Safari shows very poor performance animating while streaming assets?
- tinus_hn 8y agoThe web view is just a widget. If you want to make it full screen, make it full screen. Apple is t stopping you.
- dhimes 8y agoOK So I'm trying to understand. This is about using some Google software to annotate videos without actually changing the underlying video? I'm made annotations, but always in my video software (openshot or whatever) so they are baked into the video. They should still work ok. It would be pretty easy to do this for things you really needed. Just import your video and add some keyframes with the overlay. Or maybe you lose your URL when you edit? and just not leave everything up to Google to decide in the future IMHO. EDIT: reading farther down, I see the answer to the latter half: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18540470 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18540470
- Reason077 8y agoHuh? I am an iOS developer and I’m certainly not aware of any technical restrictions here. The YouTube app overlays all kinds of things over full screen video. Link boxes while ads play, for example. This was more about suitability for the screen format - multiple boxes with small text just didn’t work too well on mobile.
- Shinchy 8y agoUnfortunately the technology still limits this in many cases.
- donatj 8y agoI genuinely don’t believe it. They’re not using the native video player in their apps. If they can overlay controls they can overlay annotations.
- mikewhy 8y agoWhat about the mobile site?
- kibwen 8y agoThere's no NPAPI plugin required for desktop users to view annotations. All of YouTube works using standardized web tech, and mobile browsers and desktop browsers are the same underlying engines with different chrome. There's no technical reason why annotations couldn't work on the mobile site, though from a UI perspective you'd need to size them appropriately for fingers to interact with. It's not that Google can't, it's that they simply don't want to.
- untog 8y agoThat's not quite true. If you want to view the video in fullscreen on iOS it'll just show the content of the video tag and nothing else. They're working on Fullscreen API support, though.
- seba_dos1 8y agoSame.
- gsich 8y agoSame BS answer was made when Google discontinued their "instant search" feature. You could type and search results would pop up while you were typing.
- kibwen 8y agoPresumably discontinued because it ate into their ability to show ads, which means that this sounds like a fruitful opportunity for differentiation by search engines that don't rely on ad revenue.
- stickfigure 8y ago...or they discontinued it because it was a crap experience. I turned off "instant search" in every browser I used. It was awful.
- gsich 8y agoMaybe. But that was not the reason given.
- Meai 8y agoIn my opinion they should print all the annotations with their respective times to the description of the videos that still have them, with a remark like "Google Backup of annotations: 03:01-3:35 annotation text content"
- Scryptonite 8y agoOr they could keep an archive of the annotations and provide a process for the video owners to choose to have Google 'bake' them into the video permanently after they've been shut off from being used by mainstream YT interfaces. Annotation links could be visually represented in a way that indicates their link could now be found in the description.
- NullPrefix 8y agoToo much effort, won't happen. When you care only about view count and not the content, it's easier to just deprecate and delete.
- garysahota93 8y agoAgreed. I see it happen all of the time.
- Sniffnoy 8y agoNote that that won't suffice for the purposes mentioned above, as oftentimes the annotation would, say, replace a specific word in the text; the replacing word by itself won't be very meaningful, as you won't know what it was intended to replace.
- profalseidol 8y agoHow about adding the coordinates in the screen that it replaces? Some percentage distance from top left.
- 8y ago
- xfitm3 8y agoI can empathize with content creators on this. Especially on technical and/or scientific videos. I believe the description can be edited after publishing. I've also found them to be abused, and that's why I've had them disabled for quite some time.
- pier25 8y ago> FWIW, this was effectively the only way to fix content after it had been posted without changing the URL Is it not possible to re-upload a video to Youtube?
- kiddico 8y agoYou can always reupload, but the new video will have a different link. Which is a nightmare if it got popular on a link aggregation site.
- ben174 8y agoThere is a reason you can't edit a video after it's uploaded. Because you could upload a good video, get it to go viral, and switch it out with an advertisement or something else that isn't worthy of attention.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- awalton 8y agoWorse, there was content on YouTube that used the annotation system to implement choose-your-own-adventure type stories and hidden easter egg videos. That content is now not just wrong, it's broken and unusable. It's almost become the Google motto of late that they will break their own products and make your existing content unusable in some way.